Tyson Reeder is a Chicago/ Milwaukee based artist that has shown extensively here in Chicago and abroad (Jack Hanley, Kavi Gupta, Actual Size LA, Daniel Reich, etc etc etc). Tyson's activities are seemingly unlimited, from painting, sculpture, and performance to basketball, making music, curating, and so much more. This week Tyson, along with his brother Scott and sister in-law Elysia, unleash the force/farce that is Club Nutz (the worlds smallest comedy club/ disco) this week at the MCA as part of the Here / Not There exhibition. Replete with dancing, jokes, dj's, videos, workshops, robots, performances, magic and boner sound effects. These people make art fun. -Ryan Christian

You are a man of many projects, first off, tell us about the General Store and what kinds of things are happening in Milwaukee?

General Store was a storefront gallery run by myself, my brother Scott and sister-in-law Elysia. We opened it in '05 and we've been doing shows under that name since, although the actual space is no longer. The front was customized to look like a funky paper-mache cave, with rock furniture and stalactites, and the back was a white cube gallery space. The idea was to lure shoppers in off the street, (consisting of mostly Milwaukee crustypunks with modest crust wardrobe budgets) with the more inviting dimly-lit cave, where you could buy cheap non-essentials like hand-made thongs, ceramic snacks or designer doorstops. Eventually you would check out the art in back, although we realized quickly when given the option, people prefer darkness to light. This idea grew later into Dark Fair, the art fair with no lights. It had it's moments! We showed Laura Owens, Pentti Monkonenn, Cory Arcangel, Nick Lowe and had a monthly teen dance party called " Get Wacky " hosted by Milwaukee rapper Juiceboxxx. Then it became an pet store. Now it's a head shop called Dank's Glass.

I've heard lots about these strange performances and versions of art fairs that you and your brother are involved in. I love this idea, art fairs always seem so stuffy and redundant. could you talk about some of them? Why do you guys put these on? Are there any coming up?

Anyone who has spent some time in the art world is aware of it's conservatism and looking for ways to re-imagine the unexamined rituals we find ourselves mindlessly repeating. Art fairs seemed interesting to us because they are relatively young and unformed. And everyone was doing them for a minute in the mid-00's, motivated by some Burning Man-like hunger for interconnectedness, except instead of ravers with mushrooms it was bald germans with Blackberries.

Milwaukee is not on the contemporary art world map, so in '06 we thought it would be kind of absurd/interesting to try to do an art fair here. We teamed up with local curators John Riepenhoff and Nicholas Frank under the name Milwaukee International, and hosted it at an old Polish beer hall with a bowling alley in the basement called the Polish Falcon. It was insane. 30 galleries from all over the world made the trip, including Gavin Brown's Enterprise and White Columns of NYC, Galeria Comercial for Puerto Rico, Willy Wonka Inc. from Norway and Hiromi Yoshii gallery from Tokyo. Chicago's Roots and Culture were selling giant pretzels. Verne and the Originals, a local polka band, provided the ambiance. Matthew Higgs ended up writing about it at length in Artforum, saying it reminded him more of a music festival in 80's Manchester than an art fair.

Since then we have done three more fairs, one in Milwaukee and two versions of our Dark Fair, at the Swiss Institute in NYC in '08 and as part of Art Cologne in '09. Dark Fair is basically an art fair with the lights turned off and the walls painted black. Participating galleries had to use candles or battery-powered devices to light their "booths", which were designed like restaurant booths with tables and benches. It attracted some great gallerists, including Marianne Boesky, Maureen Paley, and Zach Feuer. In NYC, DJ/artist/club owner Spencer Sweeney sold penis-shaped candles while painting a self-portrait in the dark. There was a pinball arcade from Ara Peterson, a "wordless chorus" conducted with light sticks by Brian Belott and Larissa Valez, and sculptures by Christian Holstad, Mungo Thompson and Justin Sampson. Only one person's hair caught on fire.

This year at Frieze Art Fair in London we tried out our newest art fair intervention, Club Nutz,"the world's smallest comedy club". We were asked to recreate the 10x10' nightclub we run sporadically here in Milwaukee, which features a tiny stage, fake brick wall, DJ booth, bar, bouncer and velvet rope. In London, Spencer Sweeney hosted from the DJ booth, greeting confused art fair crawlers with "welcome to Club Nutz! Tell a joke and get a free beer!" Aspiring Benny Hill-type comedians came out of nowhere to test out their zingers on an art crowd. There was lots of fog, sweat and questionable dance moves.

There's a real joy in throwing yourself into something you don't know how to do. Whether it's "let's do an international art fair!" or "let's open a comedy club!", I'm always happy to step out of the introspection and calculation that goes with painting alone in the studio. It's also nice to see that spirit infect other people. Stand-up comedy is maybe the most direct way to throw oneself into the unknown. People who have never done it before may get huge laughs, although it might be for something other than their jokes. It might be the silence in between jokes or any number of technical failures.

Aside from exhibitions, you do music and video and whatnot as well, right?

Scott and I have hundreds of hours of unreleased and some would argue unlistenable tracks. You might have seen us perform under the names Night School, Sir Willy or Piano Boys. We plan on releasing a boxed set covering 1990 - 2010 around Christmas time. We also have performed several short avant-garde pieces at Daniel Reich Gallery including "Egg Fugue", a rite of spring featuring a hooded 'eggxecutioner' and "Sonata in 2-D" involving a black abstract painting with dancing geometric shapes. Currently we are working on a podcast for Vicious Pop records that will give the world a taste of the new Milwaukee genre people are calling "Comedy Trance". Imagine hours of improvised spoken word with canned laughter over minimal trance beats. Sound good?

Now on to your solo endeavors. Your paintings were really weird to me when I first saw them. They have an outsider, or dare I say high school student feel to them? But at the same time, they felt really fresh to me. What are your thoughts on your execution? How did you arrive where you are now as far that is concerned?

I started out showing in Daniel Reich's tiny efficiency apartment in Chelsea in 2002. It was a moment when a lot of young artists were turning away from slick, monumental-scaled artwork that seemed made for the airplane hanger sized galleries that seemed to be popping up everywhere, towards a self-consciously human scale, hand-made aesthetic. I became interested in a kind of experimental, alchemic approach to materials that were themselves very cheap and familiar. Ballpoint pens, fabric dye, nail polish all had real-life applications and I liked how that fed into or sometimes clashed with the content of whatever I was depicting. There is a freedom to working with mixed-media, as opposed to oil paint on canvas, that maybe parallels some of my curatorial projects. It's about temporarily suspending the burden of art history, with it's myriad ways of contextualizing every type of painting move, to let accident and invention come into the process. My patterns and marks eventually became useful in quickly defining some sort of emotionally heightened, frenzied depiction of Milwaukee, maybe like how the Impressionists dab replaced naturalism as a more immediate way to get at some sort of truth about Arles or wherever.

It's evident that you don't just use a brush, what other kinds of tools are you drawn to? What is your studio/studio practice like?

I love brushes, but I am also drawn to anything that makes an unusual mysterious mark and gets me out of the preciousness that comes with handling a horse-haired stick for too long. I use my hands a lot, my YMCA card, bleach pens, manicure rhinestones, plastic knives and forks, stencils, flannel and corduroy. I did an entire drawing with my nose once.

How do you generate your ideas for content? They appear simple and very straightforward, is it that easy? Or is there much
more than meets the eye? The last time I experienced "art envy" is when i saw your series of creepy crusty sweater paintings.

I make hundreds of abstract compositions on index cards that help me arrive at weird effects quickly. Sometimes the cards have words on the back like " raccoon " or instructions like " add blue and white dots " that I have to integrate into the abstractions whether I like it or not. This helps me get away from pointless hesitation and bad ideas that I think are genius.

It's the future, and you are a prestigious art critic. How would define the "movement" or era that is happening right now?

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

I don't think at this point it needs to be written since the last update to Fecal Face was a long time ago, but...

I, John Trippe, have put this baby Fecal Face to bed. I'm now focusing my efforts on running ECommerce at DLX which I'm very excited about... I guess you can't take skateboarding out of a skateboarder.

It was a great 15 years, and most of that effort can still be found within the site. Click around. There's a lot of content to explore.

I'm not sure how many people are lucky enough to have The San Francisco Giants 3 World Series trophies put on display at their work for the company's employees to enjoy during their lunch break, but that's what happened the other day at Deluxe. So great.

When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it? --continue reading

"[Satire] is important because it brings out the flaws we all have and throws them up on the screen of another person," said Turner. “How they react sort of shows how important that really is.” Later, he added, "Charlie took a hit for everybody." -read on

NYC --- A new graffiti abatement program put forth by the police commissioner has beat cops carrying cans of spray paint to fill in and cover graffiti artists work in an effort to clean up the city --> Many cops are thinking it's a waste of resources, but we're waiting to see someone make a project of it. Maybe instructions for the cops on where to fill-in?

The NYPD is arming its cops with cans of spray paint and giving them art-class-style lessons to tackle the scourge of urban graffiti, The Post has learned.

Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said... READ ON

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

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